The present invention relates to local loop telephony systems and more particularly to a multiple channel system for a twisted pair telephone wire local loop system.
The advent of the Internet and intranets has created a need for a system that provides additional bandwidth in the local loop to businesses and homes. Dial-up modems appear to be limited to 56 Kbps (Kilo Bits Per Second). This significantly limits the amount of graphics and multimedia information that can be transferred over a given period of time. ISDN (Integrated Digital Services Network) lines provide speeds of 128 Kbps and ISDN lines are always on (in one configuration) providing instant connections to the Internet. ISDN lines are still not fast enough for many multimedia applications and are expensive. ASDL (Asymmetric Subscriber Digital Lines) or DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) provide data rates between 128 Kbps upstream to +8 Mbps downstream. Commonly the data rate from the service provider to the subscriber (downstream) is faster than from the subscriber to the service provider (upstream). The ASDL lines are a significant improvement. However twisted pair telephone wires have bandwidth capabilities over limited distances of up to 30 MHz. None of the present solutions take full advantage of this available bandwidth. In addition, presently the twisted pair telephone line is treated as a single connection. However, there are proposals to unbundle the local loop bandwidth over twisted pair telephone wires. Presently, the only unbundled solution provides a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) channel and an ASDL channel over the same twisted pair.
Thus there exists a need for a system that takes advantage of the available bandwidth over twisted pair telephone wires in the local loop and can unbundle the available bandwidth.